Really Annoying Music Suppressors

What do you do if you are on a road trip with someone who likes to play music really loud -- especially if it's a genre you don't particularly like yourself?

Hmmm, it strikes me that the title of this column has the potential to be a tad confusing. I'm not talking about music suppressors that are really annoying -- I'm more concerned with finding something that can help me suppress really annoying music. Let me elucidate (don't try this at home. I'm a professional)...

Before we start, it might be worth taking a moment to set the scene. My wife (Gina the Gorgeous) has a humongous family on her mother's side. (She can actually trace the family back to Nova Scotia and then to Europe before the Pilgrim Fathers landed, but that's a tale for another day.) Gina's mother was one of seven siblings. Her mother's mother was one of ten. Most of the family lives in Louisiana.

About ten years ago we had a big get-together featuring just two branches of the family (branches at Gina's grandmother's level). It took the camping grounds at a really large state park to accommodate all of us. Did I ever mention that I'm really bad at remembering names and faces? But we digress …

Last week, Gina, our son Joseph, and I went down to Louisiana to celebrate Gina's birthday. During the day, Gina and Joseph visited with her mother and aunts and uncles and cousins while I worked out of our hotel room, then I met up with them all in the evenings. The reason for my mentioning this here will become apparent in a moment.

Gina loves music. She plays it all the time. She's also amazingly knowledgeable. If a tune comes on the radio and I say, "Who's that?" (or, possibly, "What's that rubbish?"), she will immediately respond with the group, album, track, and the year in which it appeared on the scene, and she's invariably right on all counts. (I can do the same sort of thing, but in my case I'm just making things up.)

The problem (for me) is that Gina likes her music really loud. She’s also keen on listening to Christian rock when she’s driving. I think both of these things are wonderful … just so long as I'm not in the car with her. The downside for me comes when we happen to be taking a long drive together -- say an 8.5 hour drive down to Louisiana (just to pick a hypothetical example out of thin air, you understand).

Now, I'm the proud owner of some amazing MDR-NC500D digital noise-cancelling headphones from Sony. I picked these up on a trip three years ago when I went to give a talk to a bunch of engineers at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington (see I’m in love!).

These little beauties bring tears of joy to my eyes whenever I'm flying somewhere on a plane. The difference when you activate the noise cancellation is truly amazing. Since I had my backpack with me on our trip to Louisiana, I surreptitiously donned these headphones. Do you know, I hadn’t realized just how much ground noise there is when you are travelling in a car -- even a really nice car like Gina's? When I turned on the noise cancellation, the rumble from the ground almost completely disappeared. Unfortunately, the noise cancellation doesn’t work on things like music, so the end result was to make the songs Gina was playing sound clearer and -- paradoxically -- louder.

It's amazing how we humans can forget what pain feels like. Once we'd arrived in Louisiana, I was swept away by the fun and frivolity, and the horror that is Christian rock became naught but a distant memory … until the time came for our 8.5 hour return trip. All I can say is that there was much metaphorical gnashing of teeth and rending of garb on the way home. Thus it was that I decided something had to be done to save me from similar anguish in the future.

May I suggest a low tech solution? Those little spungy things that you roll between your fingers before inserting into the ear canal work quite well - and the are really cheap.

I once escorted my son to a rock concert. The bass was so loud that I could literally feel it move my shirt against my chest. The high end was painful. Those little spungy things worked wonderfully to remove all pain and I was not an embarassment to my son. Can you imagine walking into a rock concert with those flight-line ear muffs? Sorry, I love my son too much to do that to him.

The little spungy things don't help much with the bass, but I suspect that those huge beasts you love don't either.

@Antedeluvian: Did you buy Joseph a pair of suppressors as well, or does his taste lean towards his mother's?

I don't know if it's just the younger generation, but Joseph seems quite happy with his earbuds in his ears -- he's impervious to anything that's going on around him -- plus in the car he tends to go into hybernation and sleep most of the journey -- he's great to have as a travelling companion because you rarely even notice he's there.

Not sure how old Joseph is, but someday he may want to see his favorite band at a local club while he is too young to get in alone. It is your fatherly duty methinks to escort him there. It makes you cool and it keeps him safe too. When that happens, please bring the monster muffs and take pictures.

I use both at the same time, the earplugs as well as the over-ear muffs often when walking through my "neighborhood", or when I sit at my open window, like when I'm soldering. The other 98% of the day it's just the earplugs. BTW, the noise ratings for the plugs and muffs are roughly comparable, if you go by the single NRR ratings.

Active cancellation isn't a total loss against lower frequecies. For instance, my Audio Technica in-ear earphones (with an IC in them from ams, which I probably stumbled on from this or a closely related blog), do an "OK" job of taking out losers' Harley noise and morphing it into the sound of a little girl's pink tyke-bike with a plastic card slapping the spokes. It's strangely appropriate that they map the noise from one with the socialization skills of an 8-year-old into a noise from an actual one.

I've never found any electronic earbuds or electronic earplugs to be comfortable when used with earmuffs at the same time, even with models of the latter that have a fair amount of clearance in the cups. They always end up pushing the in-ear things uncomfortably deep into one's cranial void.

Decades ago an old girlfriend and I used to have a rule that applied when driving -- the driver gets to pick the music, and the passenger can wear earphones if they don't like it. It was also compensation for "having" to drive. In my case it was a win-win because having her drive was a lose-lose (at best, :-)).